This lesson will define a national nominating convention and explain its purpose. You'll also learn the history of nominating conventions and how their practices have changed up to the present day.

Picking a Presidential Nominee

It's the summer or early fall of election year. You grab the remote and as you're flipping through the cable networks, you stop. What do you see? Speeches. Lots and lots of speeches. Lots of politicians giving speeches. You've just run across a political party's national nominating convention. It might seem like dry stuff, but nominating conventions are important. For many Americans, it's the grand introduction to a political party's candidate for president. Sometimes this is when the vice presidential nominee is chosen, as well. A politician may even give an exciting speech that becomes the talk of the country. We'll take a look at just how national nominating conventions work and how they've changed.

Definition and Purpose

Every four years, the two major political parties, as well as many minor parties, will hold a national nominating convention. The primary purpose of these conventions is to select the party's nominee for president. At the convention, a body of delegates, voting representatives from each state, will cast votes for a nominee until a winner is selected. Afterwards, the presidential candidate will select a vice presidential candidate to be his/her running mate. The convention is also where the statement of the party's principles and goals is adopted, which is called a platform. The proposals and goals that make up the platform are called planks. Once the presidential nominee is selected, the candidate will then give an acceptance speech, a practice popularized by President Franklin D. Roosevelt when he accepted his party's nomination in 1932.

History of Conventions

Tammany Hall Decorated for 1868 Democratic National Convention

National nominating conventions have changed since they were first adopted in 1832. In the beginning, the ordinary voter actually had no power to vote for somebody to become the presidential nominee. Instead, power lay with the party bosses, who chose the delegates at the convention. The contest was often settled in meetings of the party bosses, who would discuss possible candidates behind closed doors. These meetings popularized the imagery of 'smoke filled rooms' where decisions are made with no public consent. Often a candidate was chosen after promises and deals had been concluded among the bosses. Still, a presidential pick was often hard to settle on, and conventions could vote dozens of times in heated contests before finally arriving at a choice. For example, President Franklin Pierce would receive his party's nomination only after 49 rounds of voting by the delegates.

The power of party bosses fell with the use of party primaries in the 1960s. A primary is an electoral contest in which the voters can select the delegates to the convention themselves. By picking delegates pledged to a particular candidate, voters now had the power to choose a nominee themselves. This also meant that the nominee was now more likely to be decided before the convention actually met. Convention reforms would continue after the 1968 riots in Chicago. That year, as the Vietnam War waged, delegates at the Democratic National Convention defeated an anti-war resolution even though most Democratic primary voters had voted for anti-war candidates, causing rioting in the streets. The parties then began to open up their conventions to make them more inclusive of the wishes of the public.

The Present Era

Reagan and Ford at 1976 Convention

Nominating conventions today hold almost no suspense as to who the nominee will be. The only exception in recent decades was the 1976 Republican Convention, when going into the convention neither President Gerald Ford nor his challenger Ronald Reagan had enough delegates to secure the presidential nomination, though Ford still won on the first ballot. In the present era, conventions are ceremonial affairs designed to ratify a candidate already chosen by the voters. Also, with the wide use of television, conventions are much more toned down than before, without the chaotic proceedings of the past. Instead, parties use conventions as a way to showcase their candidate and promote their message.

Lesson Summary

A political party's national nominating convention is intended to formally choose the party's nominee for president and adopt the party's set of goals and principles, also called its platform. At first, conventions were non-democratic affairs, with nominees picked by party bosses in 'smoke-filled rooms.' However, the use of primaries democratized the nomination process by allowing voters to pick delegates themselves. Today, nominating conventions are mostly ceremonial and serve as ways for the parties to showcase their presidential ticket to televised audiences.

Summary:

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